Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

By Lucas H. Parker

It’s no secret that automation makes a tremendous impact on small businesses. Productivity is the key to increased year over year profits in any industry and can be the ultimate game-changer to make your business succeed. Automation isn’t as daunting as it seems. In this article, we’ll talk about the different types of automation and the many benefits it has for small businesses.

Types of automation

-Leads: If you are meeting new clients or responding to old ones, automated processes allow you to gain and retain leads more quickly and efficiently. With automation software like email marketing and chatbots, responding to email contact requests, assigning inbound leads, and following up on networking connections is that much faster. Think about all the time you’ll save from finally putting that phone tag game to rest.

-Sales: Automation software ultimately acts as the project manager for your sales team. While software can help your team members focus on the most important tasks ahead, it can also keep an eye on leads who aren’t ready to buy just yet. This ensures progress at every stage and enhances the sales pipeline. Automation software creates your priorities by ranking each lead based on engagement with your marketing efforts and helps make good impressions to new and potential clients.

-Shipping & Manufacturing: A combination of material handling, software robotics, and engineering to design a custom and unique system solution can free up space, cut manual labor costs, and reduce human error and injury. Conveyor Systems require half as much space as manual-operated machines since they don’t need to be grounded or need room for multiple operators. Automated conveyors also require far less human intervention in comparison to manual material handling and, let’s be honest, humans aren’t perfect. Automating your material handling processes with conveyors and proper guarding would be a big step in eliminating workplace accidents and mistakes and make processes run 10 times faster.

–E-commerce: Using automation software, small businesses can generate repeat business, send reminders to customers, and stay on top of failed billing. Take a proactive approach in keeping your operations moving smoothly and efficiently with simple automation. Automatically add, edit, delete, and transfer product information to your website and enable product data and availability updates in real-time.

-Customer Service & Engagement: With automation, you can help clients immediately, respond to feedback, and personalize communication. Making it easy for clients to ask for help can also help you navigate any problems that can arise. You can send appointment reminders, gauge client satisfaction, and even remember every client’s birthday all with a little automation to make your life easier and the business that much better.

Automation can’t (and shouldn’t) replace every task performed by people. But it can improve processes that don’t need to be completed by a human and can increase productivity as a whole. With automation, the benefits are endless and can change a small business from good to great.

The benefits of automation

-Reduce labor costs: Automation replaces some of the tasks unnecessarily performed by humans and decreases costs normally used to fix the human error.

-Adaptability: With automation, you don’t have to hire more employees to handle any fluctuation in customer demand due to scalability and agility.

-Reducing human error: Automation can help improve the accuracy of different business operations and eliminate costly errors due to manual processes. It can also significantly reduce workplace accidents, keeping your employees safe.

–Remote work opportunity: Many small businesses are accessing the talent and expertise they need with the increased use of remote workers. This unique development lowers overhead costs and allows businesses to find the right people to work on projects at hand instead of hiring a large team of full-time employees. Internal processes are automated to help allow employees to work together without being in the same location.

-Improve collaboration: Automation can help serve as a project manager, tracking project processes, communicating key dates, and keeping communication going between the team for seamless collaboration.

-Consistent customer experience: With automation, you can standardize processes like marketing, ordering, shipping, and post-sale support so you can create a consistent business experience for all of your customers and build trust throughout the community. Automation allows you to gather data and fine-tune any bumps along the way.

-Cohesive customer support: Customer support automation technologies can enhance self-service capabilities and improve customer satisfaction. Simple automation like chatbots can handle basic queries so customers don’t have to wait for human interaction.

Automation isn’t just for big corporations. Small companies can incorporate some kind of automation in every aspect of their business. Incorporating automation technologies in your small business can help increase productivity, reduce delays, minimize errors, and improve customer satisfaction. With some processes automated, small business owners can instead give their time to the things that matter, like growing the business.

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Lucas H. Parker is a business consultant from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Besides that, he has a passion for writing. Doing his research, exploring and writing are his favourite things to do. Besides that, he loves playing his guitar, hiking, and travelling.